Guy Pearce plays Eric, a laconic, intense loner we first meet sitting in his car looking about as miserable as a person can look. He wanders listlessly into a bar. A short while later he looks out the bar's grimy window and sees a trio of guys crash their truck and steal his car.

The entire movie is propelled by his determination to get his car back. Why he would care about his wheels in this bleak scorched-earth landscape is the question that fuels the story. Unfortunately, it doesn't mitigate the long dull patches in the story. Eric's absurd sense of injustice, given the sorry state of the world around him, doesn't help to make him relatable. How he got to the low place he's plummeted to goes essentially unexamined. Mostly, he just seems off-kilter.

Pearce conveys the character's emotional atrophy well, though he's supremely unlikable. In the opening scene he seemed to have been sitting in his car contemplating suicide. It's not until the final scene that the audience learns why he is so hell-bent on tracking down his car, at the cost of all else.

He's clearly been deeply emotionally wounded, but it's nonetheless hard to view him as any kind of sympathetic soul after he callously and unnecessarily murders a dwarf who tries to sell him a gun.

Shortly after that brutal killing, Eric meets Rey (Robert Pattinson), the battered, dim-witted brother of Henry (Scoot McNairy), one of the thieves who stole Eric's car. Rey has been left for dead after being shot during a hold-up he and his brother were pulling. It's not difficult for Eric to persuade Rey to help him track down the brother who couldn't be bothered to help him.

Rey's simple-minded ways are not very convincing. Pattinson mumbles unpersuasively, in an inconsistent accent from the American South.

Michod's last film was 2010's Animal Kingdom, which was also savage, but more absorbing. Endless miles of scrubby brush are punctuated at intervals by telephone poles with crucified bodies on them.

While thematic kin to Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the latter was far more involving, melancholy and hauntingly powerful.

The Rover is a bleakly dystopian film with an aimless sense of direction.